Google's Game-Playing AI Is Becoming an Eye Doctor

Look deep into DeepMind's eye and it'll tell you if there are warning signs of vision loss.

By
David Grossman

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Google's AI division, DeepMind, is partnering with an eye hospital in England with the hope that its deep machine learning abilities can find vision loss and other eye problems early on.

The Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, a leading British eye hospital, made first contact when consultant ophthalmologist Pearse Keane sent DeepMind an email through its website. "I'd been reading about deep learning and the success that technology had had in image recognition," he wrote, referring to DeepMind's highly publicized victories in human games such as go. "I had the brainwave that deep learning could be really good at looking at the images of the eye," he says now. "Optical Coherence Tomography is my area, and we have the largest depository of OCT images in the world." The proposal caught the eye of DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who emailed him back a few days later.

The core of the research will be similar to other studies using neural net algorithms: give the computer a huge amount of data—in this case more than a million anonymous eye scans—and let it learn the patterns and make predictions. Peng Tee Khaw, head of Moorfield's Opthamology, told The Guardian how complicated these scans are. They are "more detailed than any other scan of the body we do," Khaw says. "We can see at the cellular level." DeepMind hopes to train AI to catch early signs of vision loss-related age-related macular degeneration, as well as diabetic retinopathy, which vision loss related to diabetes.

Computers have long played a role in eye care. The Seva Foundation, founded in the late 1970s to cure vision loss in India and the surrounding countries, got an Apple II from Steve Jobs to process the complex data they were dealing with.

While this will be DeepMind's first foray into medical research, it's already an experienced player in the world of British healthcare. In April, it was revealed (with some controversy) that Deep Mind had been granted access to the healthcare records of over a million British patients.